Lou and Amy Weiss, a couple from Pittsburg, always dreamed to have a Hugh Newell Jacobsen house. The couple has been admiring the architect’s work for years and they really wanted to someday have one of their own. Still, they couldn’t afford it. So they started to do research in their own. They consulted a series of plans presented by a magazine and then paid $550 for the plans of Washington, D.C.-based Mr. Jacobsen. Then the couple hired a local architect to customize the house to their needs.

Their new residence was finished last December and the couple paid about $700,000. It’s a four-bedroom house that sits on four acres of land. It’s larger than the plans but this doesn’t bother them at all. Mr. Jacobsen even said that the hours turned out unusually well but that’s because the client’s followed the plans and didn’t make changes he wouldn’t have approved.

The couple can now say that they finally have their dream home. The house has white walls and no drapes. The walls and the ceilings have no moldings. The furniture is modern and simple and the decorations include paintings of barns and houses by Mr. Weiss’s father which are actually very close to Mr. Jacobsen’s architecture. Even though they followed the plans, the couple also made some changes. They expanded the house in order to gain some more space and they made the house more sustainable.{found on wsj}